This Cryptocurrency Seems Designed For A Post-State Society

Upstart crypto company Saga wants to issue a new global currency on the blockchain. Just don’t call it a stablecoin.

Saga’s SGA digital currency relies on an international reserve asset called Special Drawing Rights (SDR), which was introduced by the International Monetary Fund in 1969. This is a conventional basket of major world currencies — the US dollar, the euro, the British pound sterling, the Japanese yen, and the Chinese renminbi — that central banks around the world use to hedge against fluctuations in their own local currency. SGA borrows this model for a financial instrument and puts it on the blockchain.

These days, one SDR is worth about $1.40 USD, and SGA will be worth the same when it launches. But SGA’s value can go up or down depending on how many other people are using SGA. To buy this cryptocurrency is to cause Saga’s smart contracts to generate it from scratch. To sell it back is to burn the coins. So the monetary value of SGA can change, but the idea…